Touché

Facebook is good for many, many things. Posting cute pictures of children. Sharing meaningless, time-wasting crap. Promoting political stances that are unpopular to everyone except those people who think Sean Hannity is brilliant -- making your old camp friends wonder what the hell happened to you. Of course, the best way to use Facebook is to mess with people from work. And the people I work with? Experts.

I don't know if you knew this, but it is very easy to leave yourself logged into Facebook, even if you close the browser window. I know I didn't know that until I mysteriously became a fan of Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and Jason Chaffetz. I figured out how it happened about a week later when my co-workers gleefully crowded around a computer where another hapless dupe was still logged in, and made him a fan of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Rachel Maddow (this dupe and that dupe have very different politics).

Of course, the best way to mess with someone on Facebook is not to use their account, but to make a grand pronouncement about that person to all his/her friends. After all, what good is messing with a person if they are the only one who gets to enjoy it? I cannot tell you how many times engagement/pregnancy/relocation/sex change rumors have been started with the click of just a few keys. I would print examples, but they are quickly deleted. However, they still spread like wildfire. You can see them go from desk to desk, as people click on to the forbidden site and read the news. You would think we would be more careful than that, since we all know how social networking sites can get people in trouble at work, and since we report on that trouble. You would be wrong. After all, we have to have some joy in between reporting on hit and runs, and the death of world leaders.

Now, if I could just figure out a way to tell all of my work friends they are fired through Facebook, and make it believable. I mean, before they figure it out first.